Research on hackathon events has steadily grown in the HCI and CSCW communities and beyond, focusing on how to run events in various contexts [1]}, [2]}, [3]}, understanding how hackathon teams self-organize [4]}, how code gets used, developed and reused [5]}, running events for diverse audiences [6]}, [7]}, [8]} and identifying means to foster specific hackathon outcomes [9]}, [10]}, [11]}, [12]}. Moving such events online fundamentally changes their nature thus challenging our current understanding of how they function, what can be achieved and what remains when participants – instead of being radically co-located – are geographically distributed but still collaborate synchronously. There are few studies on online hackathons [13]}, [14]}, [15]}, [16]}. These studies however cover single events and do not focus on how teams perceive an online event and how they collaborate. Studying online events from a collaboration perspective provides a unique opportunity for researchers to better understand the affordances of synchronous collaboration in a distributed setting. Since the collaboration of participants in teams is at the core of each hackathon, we are particularly interested to understand how teams adapted to an online setting and coped with the challenge to collaborate remotely. We thus ask the following first research question:
